Five Fatal Mistakes Novice Online Writers Always Make

Updated on March 1, 2013

Whether you are a blogger, a HubPages writer you are naturally entitled to make mistakes just like any other average person, you are never going to succeed without first failing, now I’ll be revealing some of the most common major mistakes online writers repeatedly make.

We all make mistakes.

1. Not Proof-Reading Your Content

This is a total failure, do not ever tell me you never make mistakes in your writing, be it a tiny grammar mistake, a faulty sentence or just a wrong use of punctuation, a mistake is still a mistake, and one small mistake can ruin your impression and reputation for a lifetime.

When someone talks about you, they’ll be like: “oh him, yeah he makes mistakes all the time”. Needless to say, you should always be prepared for exaggerated critics.

Solution: Carefully proof-read your work and rather than murmuring it in your mind, speak it out loud, this way it’ll be easier to spot errors and you might be surprised at some of the obvious faults you’ve missed earlier!

Another word of advice is that you should proof read at least twice and not all on the same day, but instead, read your work once today and give it another read the next day, skip a night just so your mind will be refreshed and become more susceptible to seeing mistakes.

2. Copying Someone Else’s Work

Duplicating other people’s content? Not only is this messed up, Google can heavily penalize you and the results will be extremely devastating and I’m being serious with my words.

Your content’s search engine rankings could drop down by a whole lot and worst of all you will likely to get banned from Google, and once you’re banned, it's difficult to get back into their programs, especially Adsense.

Solution: I guess you’ve probably given a deep thought about this yourself, the simple solution is to write content on your own completely from scratch, not any little bits of copied work from others is allowed.

In contrary to getting penalized, if you don’t copy and break any rules, you will be “liked” by Google and they will gradually increase your authority on the web and your search engine rankings will go up faster. Original content is key!

3. Not Providing Valuable Information

This is as important as the others, unlike personal stories or literature which people read just because they like it, when it comes to online content, people are constantly searching for solutions that actually solve their problems

They don’t care what you want or what you do, they only care about themselves, what you can teach or help them. Why would anyone want to read your content when it has no value in it?

Solution: Start writing content that has value in it, something that teaches or helps solving a problem that some people face in this world.

Instead of writing content with just some valuable information in it, you should ideally put some efforts into formatting your work, so this way people will be more likely to read your stuff and not venture off, since internet users have a short attention-span.

4. Not Crafting an Attractive Excerpt

This is by far one of the most important key factors in online work, headlines and the introduction is like a teaser, sneak peak or blurb to your actual content.

In order to capture a person’s full attention into reading every single word of your work, you will have to make sure you can “make” people who have short attention-spans to stay and naturally like your post.

Solution: This is a must, spend some time crafting a beautiful killer headline and a great introduction that gets people’s attention and seriously makes them read.

I’ve heard people who spend more time writing near-perfect headlines and introductions than the actual content, just because without using a great headline and intro, less people will likely to come to you.

5. Not Making It Easier To Read

Last but not least, I would like to have you focus on formatting your post entirely to an extent where it looks great and comfortable for your audience. Just in case you didn’t know, not a lot people likes reading, especially a bunch of text after a bunch of text. It is boring, dull and very boring.

You need to break up your information to smaller bits and perhaps add a couple of images to support your work, this way, people will likely be more engaged in reading the information.

Solution: Format your content, if it’s too long, break it up to smaller bits, if you think it needs a little title or subheading, go ahead and add it. Additionally, add a picture to help visualize your point.

In my dictionary, no paragraph I write should be longer than a maximum of three lines, three is max, when it’s four, it causes a huge difference. Plus, I often like to add an image every once and then and a minimum of one is a requirement.